Cambridge, Mass., June 3, 2002 - Endeca, provider of innovative Guided Navigation solutions, today announced that the Global Information Business, a business unit of Arrow Electronics, Inc. focused on the creation and selling of information, has implemented Endeca InFront, Endeca’s new product for commerce and catalog solutions. Arrow Electronics is one of the world's largest distributors of electronic components and computer products and a leading provider of services to the electronics industry.
The Global Information Business is using Endeca InFront to provide its customers with an easy way to access its technical and commerce database of more than 16 million components. This dynamic approach to the part discovery process helps Global Information Business customers make more informed component selection decisions, speeding their time to market and saving money.
Guided Navigation from Endeca eclipses conventional "query and response" approaches to search, which place the burden on users to be familiar with the data set, have an idea of what to look for and how to describe the item, and finally to structure a query in a way the system will understand. In contrast, Guided Navigation provides an intuitive interaction model that eliminates all irrelevant information, and dynamically provides Global Information Business customers with only relevant and valid product choices. Endeca InFront enables customers to find parts in several ways: entering a full or partial part number, keyword, manufacturer, or using the parametric product tree for independent selections of multiple manufacturers or parameters. The browser environment changes dynamically as the user continues to modify the search parameters.
"We wanted to develop a solution that would address the many challenges that our customers face today when selecting components for their designs," said Fran Scricco, President and CEO of Arrow Electronics. "We looked to Endeca due to the dynamic functionality and speed of its technology, which we feel make it a robust solution. Endeca’s technology coupled with our best-in-class commerce and technical information provides us with the best component selection tool in the electronics market. We’re excited to offer this service to our customers as we continue to provide them with supply chain intelligence through the use of our information and tools."
Endeca technology enables Global Information Business customers to rapidly and easily analyze the risk associated with each part. Using Endeca’s technology as the vehicle, the Global Information Business is able to offer its customers insight into its vast commerce and technical database, providing information on alternate parts, functionally similar parts, part parametrics, the breadth of usage for each part, family lifecycle, sourcing, and part availability. Incorporating this knowledge throughout the customer’s supply chain can prevent possible re-engineering costs, and eliminate manufacturing delays.
"We know that for Arrow, it is important to provide customers with a fast, easy-to-understand way to find and select the right parts for their supply chain needs," said Jim Baum, president and COO of Endeca. "We’re proud that Arrow has chosen Endeca for their Global Explorer product. This relationship further demonstrates the power of our technology in managing the complexities of the B2B and B2C catalog markets."
Endeca solutions help businesses across a variety of sectors like retail, financial services and business-to-business with applications that address the information overload problems associated with content and catalog management as well as enterprise information access and retrieval.
About Endeca
Endeca offers innovative Guided Navigation information delivery solutions for companies who need to integrate, discover, and navigate enterprise data to solve the business problems associated with information overload. Endeca technology is already at work for leading financial services companies like Putnam Investments and Fidelity Investments, and is powering Barnes&Noble.com’s Book Browser and TowerRecords.com. Endeca solutions empower users to explore and discover relevant relationships in data and find accurate and precise results with unprecedented speed. Patent-pending algorithms provide a scalable, Web-based infrastructure for data exploration, leading to highly relevant and meaningful results every time.
Endeca technology can be applied across a wide-range of enterprise and customer applications including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) analytics, catalogs, directories, search and portal integration. Endeca solutions unlock the value in enterprise data and help businesses increase productivity, make better and faster decisions, and improve overall employee and customer satisfaction. Endeca is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, MA with sales offices in Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York, San Francisco, Washington DC and London and is backed by leading venture capital firms including Ampersand Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Venrock Associates. For more information, please visit www.endeca.com or email us at info@endeca.com.
About Arrow Electronics
Arrow Electronics is one of the world's largest distributors of electronic components and computer products and a leading provider of services to the electronics industry. Headquartered in Melville, New York, Arrow serves as a supply channel partner for more than 600 suppliers and 175,000 original equipment manufacturers, contract manufacturers, and value-added resellers through more than 200 sales facilities and 23 distribution centers in 40 countries and territories.
About The Global Information Business
The Global Information Business is an Arrow Electronics, Inc. business unit focused on the creation and selling of information to help engineers and purchasing professionals make better product decisions. Formerly known as the Arrow Digital Solutions Group, the newly restructured Global Information Business provides ‘Supply Chain Intelligence, Acceleration through Connectivity’. The organization has responsibilities for Ubiquidata, Connectivity Dashboard, Global Explorer, Risk Manager, Alert, and Parts Cleansing service. For more information on these and other services, visit www.arrow.com.